What I read -- March 2018

Library Hold Challenge #4: “A Rope of Thorns” by Gemma Files. Book 2. I read book 1 in 2011, but I don’t think it was incredibly important that I remember all the details to enjoy this one. Which I certainly did. I really like the voice and the humor.

“Akira Vol 4” These still count because I still read “Infinite Jest” in my lifetime. I lack a certain critical vocabulary for reading manga, I think, because when I started this volume I kind of thought to myself, I really hadn’t a clue where we all were, so I read the synopses for the first 3 volumes on Wikipedia. There was some stuff I missed. The other graphic novel I read this year, Persepolis, I didn’t have the same problem, but that was written in much more of an obvious chapter-style, so this time I tried to slow down and see where the transitions were. This helped a lot.

LHC #5: “Welcome to Nightvale” by Joseph Finker. It took a little while to start tolerating the voice, but this moved right along. Maybe if I had any other context than just an occasional retweet turning up in my feed I wouldn’t have had that problem. There were some delightful moments in this book, but sometimes it felt like it was trying really hard.

Best TW feedback ever

Over at the dayjob, SMEs are feverishly trying to get documents back to me all marked up, in preparation for the release that's supposed to happen the week I'm back from VP. Today's best comment: Unfortunately not true. SMEs, they're so cute.

Moraine

So a couple of days I thought I was done with this short story, and I wrote the last line of the story. I even dated it (that's how I can tell it's over). It was a little long, at 6600 words (I was aiming for 5000). But then I was walking to work, and I thought, "My, that was a lame ending. My endings are all crap." So yesterday morning, I scribbled out the date and wrote a bit more. And this morning I wrote a bit more again, and I dated it and called it done. And still, that ending seemed lame. So a few minutes later, in the last paragraph, I scratched out "the Oak Ridges Moraine" and wrote in "that stupid moraine". Much better. Now I can move on. But in the meantime, I was doing a little research about the Moraine, and I discovered that EGTourGuide lives on it. Only by one or two hundred feet, but I thought it was funny. Good for you, EGTourGuide, with all those excellent plants growing on that substandard soil, where in the olden days (you kno...

What I read: March 2024

LHC #240: "Vita Nostra" by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko. Translated by Julia Meitov Hersey. All I knew going in was dark academia. This was a neat thing to read after A Deadly Education last month. The students can leave this school at summer and winter break, but maybe they shouldn't. Also, interesting education method, providing Sasha with a CD player and punishing her if she leaves it in the mode where it plays all the tracks in sequence. "Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman. When I finished Ragnarok by AS Byatt (last month? January?) I was thinking it might have made more sense if I had any knowledge of the subject matter. The boy had left this lying around, and it was not a tough read. LHC #241: "Science on a mission: How Military funding shaped what we do and don't know about the ocean" by Naomi Oreskes. I deferred this once because it was so long. History of science is challenging for me to read, because of the need to get a grasp on dispr...

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